Colbert’s ‘Campaign’ Gets 1 Percent of South Carolina Vote

Stephen Colbert scored 1 percent of the votes in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary Saturday, and his TV show’s Twitter account was hacked over the weekend, along with “The Daily Show’s” account.

First things first: In case you forgot, Colbert injected himself into the South Carolina race over the last few weeks, buying TV ads in the state funded by his own “SuperPac” and urging South Carolina voters to vote for Herman Cain, who dropped out of the race a while ago but whose name nevertheless remained on the South Carolina ballot. Since Colbert came too late to the race to get his own name on the ballot, he wanted to persuade Primary participants to vote for Cain as a vote for Colbert.

Late last week, Colbert barnstormed the state in a series of public appearances, even appearing with Cain himself (even though Cain’s out of the race, he apparently still craves the spotlight). This story on the L.A. Times Web site summed up the final tally for Colbert/Cain: 6,324 votes out of more than 600,000.

Our take: Despite the criticism of some that was leveled at Colbert for screwing around with the South Carolina primary for the sake of drawing laughs and ratings for “The Colbert Report,” the majority of South Carolinians who turned out for the voting ignored his shenanigans. On the other hand, it is amazing to us that more than 6,000 of them did waste their votes on a comedian.

Meanwhile, someone hijacked the Twitter accounts of both “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” and posted a number of unauthorized Tweets on both of them. At least, that’s according to this “chronology” put together by the Web site known as Buzzfeed.com.

We look forward to both “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” Monday night to see what Colbert and Stewart have to say about the South Carolina primary and Newt Gingrich’s come-from-behind victory.

Meanwhile, you can watch Colbert’s most recent show from last Thursday right here: